Impact of COVID-19 protocols on IEQ and students’ perception within educational buildings in Southern Spain

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fact that air quality is essential in buildings. In the case of educational buildings, teaching activities were moved to an online format during the 2020/2021 academic year, with only activities such as exams remaining face-to-face. This strategy required the development of protocols to ensure that classrooms were safe spaces. This study assesses the impact of these protocols in the indoor environmental conditions of educational buildings in Southern Spain. For this purpose, a measurement campaign was carried out at the Fuentenueva Campus of the University of Granada. The results show that the protocols have guaranteed effective ventilation. However, other indoor environmental variables have also been affected, including the satisfaction of users during exams due to temperature, relative humidity (RH) and noise. The highest levels of satisfaction were related to indoor lighting, while the highest levels of dissatisfaction were related to the indoor thermal environment. Among the main causes of dissatisfaction were draughts and outdoor noise, directly related to natural ventilation protocols during the pandemic. Based on these findings, current pandemic protocols should be revised and redesigned to minimize the impact on student satisfaction and perceived learning performance from the identified environmental sources in this research.